48 POPULAR SCIENCE
FOR DECADES, THE PROMISE OF QUANTUM
computing has tickled the neurons of drug-makers, spies,
and tech CEOs. Such a machine, if perfected, would speed
up drug discoveries, decode ciphers, and help AIs parse our
digital data. This new brain hinges on the bendy concept of
superposition, the idea that an object can be in two states
at once—a coin spinning so fast, it’s both heads and tails.Conventional computer chips, whether in your phone
or a supercomputer, hold transistors that process informa-
tion as binary code: Everything is either a 0 or a 1. Quantum
computers use qubits ( “cue-bits”), which can be both a 0 and
a 1. The machines they inhabit can crack problems faster.
But there’s a rub: Qubits are fragile. Any interference can
muddy computations. Yale University applied physicists